Today, I’m very pleased to welcome the editors of Augur Magazine, a new publication of intersectional Canadian speculative fiction. They’re currently running a Kickstarter to fund their first two years of publication. For a taste of the types of things they intend to publish, check out their Preview Issue, which is available for free.

Welcome! To start things off, could you please each briefly introduce yourself and talk a bit about your vision for Augur Magazine?

Kerrie: Hello! Thanks so much for having us. I’m (obviously) Kerrie, cat lover extraordinaire and the Editor in Chief of Augur.

When it comes to Augurian vision, I think we’ve all always wanted to create space for the kinds of stories we wanted to read. For me, it was a matter of time and place. Augur is all about creating space for stories that don’t always have the room to be told—whether intersectional storytelling (something we gravitate towards naturally as a fairly intersectional editorial staff) or stories that fit between genres.

We’ve talked a lot about our goals and wants for intersectionality over the last month on our kickstarter campaign, so i’m going to focus for a second on the second point. We’re really looking for stories that feel like they don’t belong, or that might not fit a single or defined genre. It’s one of the reasons we aren’t limiting ourselves to speculative or realist work—we take both, because we think that they aren’t as different from one another as they’re often treated. That said, we do lean pretty heavily on the speculative fiction side of things. There’s just so much room there to explore the kinds of topics we love.

Alex: We’re thrilled to be here! I’m Alex, the Managing Editor of Augur and a JD Candidate at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law.

Mado: Great to be here! I’m Mado: Senior Editor for Augur and classical pianist who moonlights as a writer (or is it the other way around?)

How did you all meet, and how did the idea to launch Augur come about?

K: A half decade or so ago, I launched a speculative fiction magazine at the University of Toronto called The Spectatorial. This was, in part, a response to something so many spec fic readers are familiar with—how little speculative fiction is in the English Literature curriculum, despite the fact that it’s such a rich literary landscape. The mag quickly became one of the biggest pubs on campus. And, to my surprise and delight, it also became a blissfully queer and intersectional space.

It was easy to make The Spectatorial that kind of space. It happened naturally. We want to bring that sense of ease with us to Augur—we want to be coincidentally intersectional, that kind of space that creates a gravitational force. It will take work on our part. Natural doesn’t mean easy for us. But I remember the joy in the faces of the students who were a part of The Spec—here was a speculative fiction environment that supported them! My hope is that Augur will generate that same kind of joy on a larger scale than a university campus. The Spectatorial was always what I considered a training ground for the magazine-that-would-become-Augur, but it was definitely a force in making us realize how much need remains for spaces that explicitly look to welcome intersectionality. None of those students should have been that happy that they finally felt like they belonged—they should have had that experience much sooner.

As for how we met, we’re mainly school chums. Alex was an editor of The Spectatorial after I was, and Mado and I met online many, many moons ago—but officially met in person in a writing group I ran at the University of Toronto. I’m very lucky to have them on the team.

As editors, I know it’s sometimes hard to pin down exactly what you’re looking for in a story, and sometimes the best stories are the ones you never knew you wanted to read until you’ve read them. That said, do you have any particular soft spots in fiction? Are there are any subjects or styles or types of voices you’re hoping to see in the submission pile, or things that you don’t see enough of in other publications that you’re hoping Augur can highlight?

K: I’m a big sucker for pieces that are only-kind-of-speculative and/or that play with your idea of what a story is meant to do. I like being left with questions and uncertainty when I read, but especially when those questions and that uncertainty is joined with a sense of fulfillment. When you get something from a story, but it takes you some time to realize what you’ve gotten—maybe you never get more than a feeling. This is especially true when the voice and writing are crystal clear—I want to be challenged when I read, but I don’t necessarily like being challenged to read it in the first place. That’s also, of course, highly dependant on each individual piece. Sometimes the dense, difficult-to-read pieces are my favourite. But the above is the easiest way to get on my Yes list.

A: I love stories that have lush settings—I’m always drawn into stories that have a strong atmosphere and some well-placed details about their environment. I have a huge soft spot for urban fantasy. Seeing cities turned magical, dystopic, futuristic, or otherwise speculative enthrals me every time. There isn’t a lot of urban fantasy set in Canada, so I think I would really latch onto stories like that.

I find that lately there’s been a resurgence of stories written from the second-person perspective, and I’d definitely like to see more of these stories coming to Augur. There’s something about the directness and intimacy of this approach that I think can have really fascinating effects on storytelling and on how we experience narratives.

M: The pieces that stood to me the most in our submissions were the ones that were completely unapologetic in their tone. The ones that dropped me in an entirely unfamiliar setting and didn’t spoon-feed me information until I felt comfortable, but instead made me do some of the work of puzzling out where I was and what was happening. (Of course this can only be effective if the writing is excellent!) More generally speaking, I’m always drawn in by stories in a folkloric style, with echoes of oral tradition.

Shifting gears a bit, you’re based in Toronto, which seems to be home to a good number of speculative fiction writers. Do you think there’s anything particularly speculative or science fictional about Toronto? What are your favorite spots in the city, or places you’d recommend to first time visitors?

K: Oh, definitely. But then again, I was the kind of kid that went chasing after rabbits or into forests, convinced magic was just a turn away—I think most of our environments are brimming with the speculative, the what-ifs. It’s one of the reasons we worked with one of our artists, Ann Sheng, to do up a speculative landscape series—a fairytale creature in the rollings hills of Alberta, a dragon in the mountains of the Yukon, and an apocalypse in Quebec City. One of our goals is to make sure we’re recognizing the magic that’s all over our environments and acknowledging all kinds of spaces. And, of course, as we do this it’s essential that we carve out room for Indigenous/Aboriginal creators to engage this conversation, and so we plan on including Indigenous/Aboriginal voices as often as we can.

But yes. I’ve segued. For your actual question. Toronto, specifically…I’d say climbing the hill to St. Clair and looking out over the city is pretty wonderful. You really get a sense of scope, being so high that you can see the lake. Otherwise it’s easy to feel lost. There’s also tons of alleyways behind houses that are covered in street art and have this gorgeous city beauty to them, and it’s easy to imagine slipping between houses and disappearing into another world. It’s also very easy to imagine being spirited away in the city’s ravine—a long, winding stretch of nature and greenery that’s carved throughout Toronto. That’s my stress place, and it has a wonderful calmness to it.

A: I think there’s a diversity of worlds that make up Toronto—it’s a collection of different neighbourhoods, of course, but it’s also an amalgamation of different cities. I’ve lived my whole life in Scarborough, which was originally a separate city but became an administrative district and borough of Toronto. Toronto is utterly sprawling, and many places are difficult to get to even with public transit. I feel like every week I discover an entirely new neighbourhood or area, and this limitlessness has always felt magical.

One of my favourite places in the city is actually the University of Toronto’s downtown campus. It’s a beautiful campus, and lots of sleek, newly designed buildings sit beside castle-like structures that are nearly two hundred years old. This will be a very controversial statement for every University of Toronto student, but I actually love Robarts Library, the largest individual library at the university. Robarts is reviled for being a particularly imposing and unattractive example of brutalist architecture, but it’s also designed in the shape of a peacock! I’m in love with how one of the most ominous, ugly buildings in the city is actually a giant concrete peacock filled with academic books. To me, that’s absolutely wonderful.

But I think the most speculative elements of Toronto are quietly nestled into the background. Kerrie talked about the beautiful street art in the alleys, and I’d like to mention the “Outside the Box” program, where local artists paint works of art on traffic signal boxes throughout the city. I think one of the most speculative things about Toronto is that it’s always trying to transform and represent itself through art.

Some places that I would recommend are the Scarborough Bluffs, Rouge Park, and the beaches. There are countless parks, woodlands, ravines, and trails hidden throughout Toronto, especially in the suburbs, and I think exploring them is a lot of fun.

M: I grew up in a residential area of downtown Toronto, and I’ve always thought there was a kind of fungal quality to the city: the creeping spread of its outskirts, the connective root system of the PATH. There’s an awesome tension between the straight-laced, gridded areas of the city, and the weirdnesses that permeate it, such as the ROM’s crystal growth, the life-sized sculpture of a white elephant in my neighbourhood, and whatever the heck is going on at OCAD. The place is full of great little glitches in what is supposed to be a very orderly, chitinous code. Plus there’s Dundas Street, which makes me very uncomfortable. It’s everywhere you look. You can’t get away from it. It knows all.

For first-timers I recommend Kensington Market and Ward’s Island for great walkarounds.

On a related note, I like to ask my fellow Canadians about the idea of “Canadian Literature”. Do you think there’s a particular theme, tone, or some common unifying thread that makes a piece of writing particularly Canadian and sets it apart from other fiction?

K: I think that there’s a tone we’ve learned to expect when it comes to thinking about what Canlit “is”. There’s a good number of tropey themes—cottages, nature, feeling sad or morose in the city, etc., etc.. When Augur talks about Canlit, that’s not necessarily what we’re looking for. Recently, there have been a number of excellent pieces circulating that interrogate what “Canlit” is and how it needs to be rebuilt in order for it to function as a responsible, representative space. I especially recommend these pieces by Chelene Knight, Alicia Elliot, and Gwen Benaway.

I’m less concerned with what Canlit has been and more concerned with what we can make it.

A: If you ever take a course on Canadian literature at a university, there will always be a student there who summarizes Canlit as being “about nature”, or about the tension between rural and urban life. The prof will then spend the rest of course trying to show how there is so much more beyond that, haha.

Nature is of course a major element of CanLit, but I think that a more important thread of themes in contemporary Canadian Literature is the struggle between the old and the new. There’s a very palpable and vivid tension between the historic, nostalgic, and somewhat inaccurate sense of what Canadian literature was—stories about small towns and the encroaching wilderness—and emerging Canadian literature, which explores immigration, cultural diversity, poverty, and the continued destruction of Indigenous/Aboriginal communities. Matched with these I think is the struggle to reconcile ideals and actuality. What excites me the most is that there’s a flux of exciting emerging writers expanding the conversation of what Canlit is and could be, and I think Canlit is going to open up to whole new worlds in the near future.

M: Three words come to mind: anxious, jealous, and funny. At least that’s for the CanLit I’ve read, which for a long time was dictated by Giller frenzy and Book City tables. I’m really excited to see where CanLit is going, and from what I’ve read more recently, I’m hopeful that it’s going towards a space with fewer guardians and more chaos.

Any closing thoughts you’d like to share about Augur, the world in general, or other personal projects you’re working on you’d like people to know about?

K: I’d love to mention the Augur Magazine Preview Issue! Our inaugural pre-issue (a collection of reprints) was published at the end of August, on the same day that we launched our kickstarter, and is free to read on our website. It’s a collection of reprints, spanning fiction, poetry, and comics, and features both established and emerging creators. We had an amazing time working with our contributors, and we really can’t express enough how happy we are to have been able to produce this first collection. It’s a good starting point to see what we’re going to be looking for in the future (and, if we fund we’ll open to original submissions October 1!), and I think I speak for all of us when I say that we felt very lucky as we hemmed it together. We can’t wait to produce more like it.

Thank you all for dropping by! I can’t wait to see what the future of Augur has in store!